Description
Book SynopsisAutobiography is naturally regarded as an art of retrospect, but making autobiography is equally part of the fabric of our ongoing experience. We tell the stories of our lives piecemeal, and these stories are not merely about our selves but also an integral part of them. In this way we live autobiographically; we have narrative identities.
In this book, noted life-writing scholar Paul John Eakin explores the intimate, dynamic connection between our selves and our stories, between narrative and identity in everyday life. He draws on a wide range of autobiographical writings from work by Jonathan Franzen, Mary Karr, and André Aciman to the New York Times series Portraits of Grief memorializing the victims of 9/11, as well as the latest insights into identity formation from the fields of developmental psychology, cultural anthropology, and neurobiology. In his account, the self-fashioning in which we routinely, even automatically, engage is largely conditioned by social norms and
Trade Review
"In this fascinating, lucid, and deeply humanistic extension of his earlier work on autobiography, Paul John Eakin illuminates the acts by which we become players in a dynamic narrative identity system that is fundamental to our sense of self. Eakin energetically pursues the broadest questions, deftly incorporating insights from neurobiology and anthropology to help us see the ways that autobiography is an integral, adaptive part of our experience as we live it, and of our creation of a future." -- Jeffrey Wallen, Hampshire College, author of Closed Encounters: Literary Politics and Public Culture
"Living Autobiographically is a wide-ranging and compelling meditation on the grounds for believing that various registers of narrative are essential to our sense of who we are. As ever, Paul John Eakin is leading reflection on life writing into new places." -- David Parker, Chinese University of Hong Kong, author of The Self in Moral Space: Life Narrative and the Good
Table of Contents
1. Talking about Ourselves: The Rules of the Game
Jolting Events
The Case against Narrative Identity
Truth or Consequences on Oprah
The Narrative Identity System
Narrative Rules, Identity Rules
"My Father's Brain"2. Autobiographical Consciousness: Body, Brain, Self, and Narrative
Antonio Damasio and the "Movie-in-the-Brain"
Doing Consciousness3. Identity Work: People Making Stories
Looking at Vermeer: "Inner" Lives and "Outer" Forces
Everyday Lives
"'My Father... "'
The Pressure of Circumstances, the Power of Story4. Living Autobiographically
The Homeostatic Machine
"Arbitrage": Andre Adman and "Remembering Remembering"Works Cited
Index
